


still point of the turning world

by pinkmoon



Category: The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Cousins, Familial Relationships, Gen, Growing Up, M/M, References to Illness, everyone loves cool older cousin Frodo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27218911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkmoon/pseuds/pinkmoon
Summary: A diptych of Frodo and Pippin's relationship; from childhood to after the War of the Ring(Did you know there were only 9 works tagged Frodo Baggins & Pippin Took? I didn't like that at all!)
Relationships: (admittedly the Frodo/Sam is largely background but it's important), Frodo Baggins & Pippin Took, Frodo Baggins/Sam Gamgee
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48





	still point of the turning world

Pippin bypassed the adults catching up in the parlor, and even Bilbo who momentarily stooped to greet him. He breezed past the kitchen, forgoing a peek at what was laid out for elevenses, which took a fair deal of discipline for any young Hobbit but most certainly for Pippin, who cared very much what they were to be eating soon, and how much of it he could secret away for later. He was singularly focused on arriving at what he knew to be Frodo’s room. It had been quite a while since he’d visited Bag End - likely not since Frodo first moved to live with Bilbo, and there had been an influx of familial curiosity disguised by well-wishing.

But for Pippin that was ages - _lifetimes_ \- ago by his own standards. Pippin had an entire birthday (his twelfth!) since then, which Frodo was unable to attend. Pippin pouted about it for an hour or two until Merry managed to sneak him a scoop of frosting off his birthday cake as a welcome and clever distraction.

He threw open the door without knocking. Frodo sat curled in his favorite velvet green armchair, a book balanced in the crook of his knees. 

“Pip!” he greeted, visibly taken aback. “I didn’t hear your family come in.”

“The ride here was very long and bumpy!” Pippin huffed, and threw his cap to the ground. “And we ate breakfast very early!”

“What a tragedy,” Frodo clucked, but Pippin plowed ahead unaware of being teased.

“And I wanted to bring my birthday gifts to show you what I got, but mama said I’d only lose them, and to be sure, she is right to say that, even if it’s unfair!”

Frodo nodded, closing his book and putting it aside. 

“And lastly,” Pippin gasped, “I never see you no more - ”

“ _Any_ more,” Frodo corrected, but was summarily plowed over by Pippin’s lamentations,

“So that by the time I see you I have forgotten all the things I even wanted to tell you at all!”

Pippin slumped to the ground, partly from defeat, and partly from a lack of breath.

“Dear cousin,” Frodo said, “I have confidence you will think of a great many new things to tell me today, regardless.”

Pippin considered that for a moment, then nodded, his mess of hair bouncing in tandem.

“That is true,” Pippin conceded. “My ma says I can talk more’n anyone she has ever heard.”

“I think she may be correct.”

Pippin grinned wickedly at that and opened his mouth to counter, but instead his jaw stayed slack, as if the thought were knocked out of his ears. Pippin’s head jerked upwards, and Frodo watched his eyes flick to follow some unknown object, and then widen in fright.

“Oh, ick!” Pippin yelped, and stood, pointing at the window. “Frodo, Frodo, look!”

“What is it?”

“It’s a spider or something horrible like that!” He waved his index finger about. “It’s awful!”

Frodo twisted in his chair to look. Over where he sat, a plump brown spider skittered down along the open seam of the window. It wasn’t as large as Pippin’s reaction seemed to merit, but it was moving quickly towards the sill and therefore, threateningly, into the room.

“I see it,” Frodo said, monitoring the offending intruder. “And what shall we do with it?”

“We shall use one of your big books and give it a _swack_ ,” Pippin answered, thrusting out a fist for emphasis. 

“Pippin!” Frodo chided. “How unkind of you! You want it dead?”

Pippin stuck his tongue out between his teeth and hissed.

“Too many legs!” he concluded, and shuddered.

“I still don’t believe that merits its swift and untimely demise…” Frodo mused, and stood to begin searching for something to help usher it out of the open window. “Let’s help it back to where it came from.”

He gestured for Pippin to hand him a small volume of Elvish poetry laid on his writing table. Pippin fetched it as swiftly as he could, unwilling to take his eyes off the spider.

Frodo tried to shepherd the small spider onto the book, but it darted about the windowsill, evading him. Pippin squealed, torn between delight and horror.

“Squash it, Frodo! It’s going to leap onto your hand!”

Determined, Frodo managed to corner the wriggling thing, and with no other recourse, the spider skittered onto his book. Quickly, Frodo flicked it out of the open window. 

Pippin stumbled about dramatically with his hands clutched to his chest, finally collapsing to his knees with a thud.

“What a fright!” Pippin cried, in a near perfect imitation of his mother. Frodo had to stifle a laugh, so he disguised it by falling back into the plush armchair. He waited for Pippin to clamber up into his lap, as he knew he would. Pippin caught his breath, righted one of the suspender straps that had fallen loose over his shoulder, and indeed scrabbled off the floor and onto the chair with Frodo.

“You were very brave,” Pippin commended, nodding sagely.

“I think it was rather more frightened of us than we were of it. Imagine, to be so far away from anything you know,” Frodo illuminated, “and then to meet your unkind demise at the hands of a book.”

“You’re right,” Pippin said, after a moment of thoughtful consideration. “I would hate to be killed by a book.”

He stretched out languidly across Frodo’s lap, like it was the throne on which he was born, his oversized feet kicking aimlessly beneath knobby, mosquito-bitten ankles. He tilted his head back and turned his wide, brown eyes towards the swath of sky seen through the window. 

“Do you miss Brandy Hall?” Pippin asked, twisting his fingers in his suspenders as he watched the clouds pass.

Frodo considered that. All in all, he largely did not. He was quite happy with Bilbo, and his newfound privacy, and the great many books and stories he indulged in daily. Though he did miss the company of those his age, sometimes. And, admittedly, there was something missed about the warm, palpable adoration of those like Merry trailing after him and hanging on his every word.

“Sometimes,” Frodo answered.

“You’re not going to live there again, are you?” asked Pippin.

“No, I should hope not.”

Pippin sighed.

“I thought you’d say that,” he said gravely, like a Hobbit well beyond his years. “Now I shan't not never see you again.”

Frodo did not correct his labyrinthine grammar this time; he seemed too morose already to add insult to injury.

“Please don’t act as if I’ve died,” Frodo cajoled. “You know where to find me, and I’m certain Bilbo and I will visit Buckland, and Tookland as well.”

“Bilbo never goes anywhere, and you know it!”

Pippin had a point there, though Frodo wouldn’t concede it. Instead he patted down Pippin’s unruly curls and said,

“I swear to you, I will always make it a point to see my favorite cousin.”

Frodo watched as Pippin’s expression slowly twisted into something gleefully maniacal.

“Say it again!” Pippin demanded.

“My _favorite_ cousin,” Frodo repeated obediently. Pippin cackled and rolled sideways off the chair, bounding around the room.

“I knew it!” Pippin whooped, and stomped his feet, “This will make Merry so terribly upset!”

\-------------------

Sam immediately reached to take Pippin’s cloak from him. Perhaps an impulse of old habit from days where their social status felt more deeply striated; perhaps only showing hospitality as the second Master of Bag End. Either way, Sam hurried Pippin inside, swept the cloak from his shoulders, and started in on chiding him.

“He’s not well today,” Sam began sternly, all the while kissing both of Pippin’s cheeks in greeting. “I know you’ll get him all riled up if I don’t warn you.”

Pippin felt a stone forming in his stomach.

“Oh?”

“Naught to worry about, he just needs his rest,” Sam said. “He’s been looking forward to your visit all month.”

“As have I,” answered Pippin. He looked about the parlor, and was warmed to see traces of Frodo and Sam everywhere. Their mismatched jackets hung on twin hooks beside each other, Frodo’s books and a palette of watercolor paints rested atop a worn pair of oven mitts. The Smial smelled of freshly baked bread, and the floors felt warm and well-tread.

Pippin found his way to Frodo’s room. He pushed his ear against the door but heard nothing. He tried hard to imagine Frodo slotted into his old chair, happily reading the afternoon away. Even with Sam’s warning, it was still too hard to conceive of Frodo so ill.

He gingerly pushed the door open.

“Hullo, favorite cousin,” Pippin called in, cautiously. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

He was relieved to find Frodo, as usual, in his favorite green armchair. His head rose from where it slumped against his shoulder, and he blinked owlishly at the doorway.

“Pippin?”

“Aye. And now I’ve woken you, I’m sorry.”

Embarrassed, Pippin inched backwards, hand on the doorknob.

“You certainly did not,” Frodo insisted, and reached feebly toward him. “I was only daydreaming. Please come here.”

Pippin approached, and watched as Frodo’s gray eyes scanned him uneasily, as if he couldn’t focus on any part of him for too long.

“Samwise insisted you’d want the interruption. But I’m here all week, Frodo, I can give you your peace.”

“I have quite enough peace, thank you,” Frodo teased, and gestured vaguely beside him. “Please sit with me.”

Pippin sank down onto a well-worn footstool just beside Frodo’s chair and hugged his knees to his chest. Something about Frodo had always made Pippin feel like a child - even before the arduous journey that left them all feeling small and ill-equipped. Perhaps it was Frodo’s keen intelligence, or the inward solemnity he carried from the time of his parents’ death, or that hard-to-place Elven quality that felt touched by an otherworldliness, but Pippin eternally felt like a yapping puppy at Frodo’s heels. Today, soaking in Frodo’s gaunt face and subdued energy, he’d never felt more juvenile.

“Are you feeling unwell?” Pippin asked. He feared the response, but perhaps that was why he’d felt so compelled to ask it straight away. His brain was too clouded by anxiousness to comprehend anything else.

“It’s just my eyes,” Frodo said. “Sometimes they ache. My vision comes in fits and starts.”

“Oh,” said Pippin, and wished he could muster something wiser to say. Frodo roundly rejected too much sympathy, and Samwise was on call for any required fretting and doting, so Pippin had found that attempting to ‘make himself useful’ often ended in the pair of them feeling suffocated and annoyed.

Pippin reached out and stroked the back of Frodo’s hand. The skin there felt insubstantial and cool as paper.

“You’re quite cold,” Pippin noted.

“Am I?” Frodo asked.

“I can get you another blanket?”

Frodo smiled wanly. “I’d much prefer you hold my hand.”

Pippin clasped Frodo’s hand between both of his own, kneading gently.

“There we go,” Pippin said. “That’ll surely do some good.”

Frodo hummed his satiated reply. He blinked his eyes slowly and purposefully a few times in succession, and as Frodo lifted his chin, Pippin could see a new clarity in his gaze.

“There you are,” Frodo said, “There’s my Pip.”

“Here I am, indeed,” Pippin answered, and fought back an intense and sudden urge to weep.

Frodo’s illnesses were myriad and unpredictable since his return from Mordor. There were the nightmares, and the breathless moments of panic, of course. Pippin understood those acutely. But Frodo also seemed to inherit erratic moments of profound weakness. One week they would be out drinking and dancing at the pub, the next Sam would write that Frodo was feverish and too pained to eat. Pippin often grieved at the unfairness, and wished he knew who to curse for such cosmic, unfixable injustice. He would walk to Mordor all over again if it meant he’d return to find Frodo feeling whole and unburdened once more. But he knew the idea was only fantasy, and if such quests were possible, Sam would already be halfway there.

Pippin was momentarily distracted by a flash of silver just above Frodo’s head. He struggled to find it again in the dimmed light, but again it seemed to flutter, just a bit higher on the curtains. It was the flap of some bug’s metallic wings.

Pippin stood and began scanning the room.

“Do you need something?” Frodo questioned, watching Pippin stalk about the place. He forgot how tall Pippin returned from his travels; his head threatened to brush the lanterns.

“A paper’ll do it…” Pippin mused thoughtfully, and reached for something that looked largely blank on Frodo’s writing desk. He held the paper aloft for Frodo’s approval, but Frodo merely shrugged. Pippin returned and gingerly leaned over Frodo’s chair, careful not to jostle him or to startle the skittering bug. Patiently, he eased the bug, leg by spindly leg, onto the bit of parchment and lowered it to the window.

“What’re you doing there?” Frodo warned. “Please don’t sit in my lap - I don’t think I can support you any more.”

“Nearly done…” said Pippin. He shook the paper against the windowsill as encouragement. “Out you get.”

“What’s getting out?”

“Ah, just some wee beetle,” Pippin answered breezily. The metallic wings flickered once more, and then it buzzed lazily away.

Pippin clicked the window shut and clambered back down, returning triumphantly to his foot stool. Frodo was beaming. His chest bounced with silent laughter.

“What?” Pippin asked, but Frodo only shook his head and said,

“Nothing at all. You only reminded me of something I’d nearly forgotten.”

“Something stupid I’ve done, I reckon,” Pippin chuckled.

“No,” Frodo said warmly. “No, nothing stupid at all.”

“Shall I take your hand again?” Pippin ventured, and Frodo nodded appreciatively. The skin was once again cool, despite how shortly they had been parted. Pippin reflexively lifted the back of Frodo’s hand to his flushed cheek. Then, overcome, he turned and kissed Frodo’s knuckles.

“I’m still here, Pippin,” Frodo said, and Pippin was simultaneously shaken and unsurprised that Frodo seemed able to see through him so clearly. 

It was only in realizing how unafraid Frodo seemed that Pippin at all grasped the profundity of his own terror.

“Please don’t cry,” Frodo said, and Pippin shook his head.

“I won’t, I won’t. Sam would throttle me for upsetting you.”

Frodo chuckled.

“Please look at me,” Frodo entreated, and Pippin blinked back his tears and met Frodo’s steady, intense gaze.

“I love you dearly,” Frodo insisted. “Dearly, cousin, _dearly_. I want to enjoy your visit.”

“You will,” Pippin swore. “I shall act nothing short of a fool.”

“I should hope so.”

Warmed, Pippin continued,

“And I have a new instrument I brought along. It’s a strange little stringed thing from Gondor.”

“I cannot wait to hear it.”

“I’m miserable at it,” Pippin asserted gleefully. “You’ll despise it.”

“We’ll have a concert after dinner!” Frodo declared, and the laughter sloughed away their dark mood, so much so that even the room seemed to brighten. 

“Help me into the kitchen, won’t you?” Frodo asked. “Let’s catch Sam up on our plans.”

Pippin stood, and bent to steady Frodo around his waist to help him to stand. As he bent low, Frodo cleared his throat.

“When my vision is like this,” Frodo began in a low voice, and Pippin froze. “I feel something pulsing outwards behind my eyes, the way you might feel a headache coming on. But instead of pain, it’s an unbearable, hot light.”

Pippin watched Frodo swallow thickly. Frodo’s eyes darted quickly back and forth, back and forth, as if he were reading, though he was seemingly looking at nothing at all.

“Pippin,” he rasped. “I think what I see are the fires in the mountain.”

Pippin couldn’t think of anything to say. He could feel Frodo’s heart hammering in his rib cage.

“Please don’t tell Sam,” Frodo pleaded. “He worries so much already.”

“I won’t, dearie, I won’t,” Pippin assured, and with a swift, confident motion, he helped Frodo to his feet. They both exhaled in unison. Frodo swayed uneasily, but slowly found his footing.

“Come,” Frodo invited, but nonetheless let Pippin take his arm and lead him out. _What do you mean to show me, little Pip_ , Frodo could recall himself teasing as Pippin hauled him bodily out the door and down to the creek, or some muddy ravine, full of mischief and vigor and a great, irrepressible love of the world.


End file.
